C++, Linux, libferris and embedded development. Yet another blog from yet another NARG.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Zoneminder on the n9. Maybe n900 too?

My growing collection of Qt/QML applications has now hit 6 apps with the inclusion of a Zoneminder client for the n9. As I still have ideas for more apps I wonder how long until I fill half a screen with my own apps on the device ;)

Anyways, the Zoneminder app uses server side scaling and jpeg generation to keep bandwidth down and CPU/RAM very low on the device. I have modified some of the images for example purposes. The app is basically as shown but will display your real camera data instead of Koalas... Unless you are lucky enough to have some furry little friends. The first camera starts a live view right off the bat when the app starts, so there is as little finger use needed to get some useful action from running the app.

Only active cameras are listed. The play button changes the image on the right to be a 1 second rolling "live view" of that camera. The little watch moves to the recorded events for that camera which is shown below. The config is quite simple; the Zoneminder server URL, and the user/password to login to that server.

Alarm events are shown on the left side and the play button rolls through that event with the progress bar showing how far through the alarm you are. Naturally both the lists scroll to show more cameras or events if there are more than 5. By default only 25 of the most recent alarm events are shown in the list. A future expansion might allow paging back to see older ones.

I'll take a look at apps-for-meego at some stage. Using github and rsync like this allows rapid development (seconds from emacs to device), so it helps out in getting each new feature or change I want in there.

The github directory should be able to be copied to /home/user on the n9 and all you have to do then is import the .desktop file to get an icon on the home screen.